The world of professional sports is overflowing with quick-paced games with exciting action that will have you on the edge of your seat, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep things frantic and fast to have a good time. For players who enjoy sports but also love a good Final Fantasy or X-COM, tactical sports games offer a unique way to engage with your favorite sport.
In tactical games, developers convert sports into turn-based games where you can carefully plot and plan your way to the top, regardless of how strong your reflexes are. If you enjoy turn-based gaming and are looking for a new sports title to check out, these tactical sports games may be just what you’re looking for as the holiday sales season approaches.
The Blood Bowl Series
The king of all tactical sports games, Blood Bowl is what happens when you take rugby and American football, then toss them in a blender with the violent world of Warhammer. Managers field teams from the Warhammer universe, like High Elves, Dwarfs, Orcs, Chaos, and more, looking to advance the ball down the field and score a touchdown. Along the way, they batter, bludgeon and occasionally outright kill the opposition with big blocks, powerful traits, and special moves.
Built on top of an existing tabletop game, Blood Bowl is turn-based sporting action, with players allowed to take turns with all of their players, with a caveat: failing on a roll means your entire turn ends. If your first player trips over trying to go a bit too fast, turn over. If you try to block with a lineman who gets knocked down instead, turn over. Winning matches levels up your players while also earning money you can then spend on better one or other perks for an enthralling campaign play. You don’t even need to invest in the official releases, as Fumbbl lets you play online for free in a graphically simple but fully mechanically valid form.
Football, Tactics & Glory
For fans of the world’s sport looking to have a tactical approach to the beautiful game, Football, Tactics & Glory is a must-play. The game puts you in control of team management in all its forms. Players sales and purchases let you identify future talents and make sales to fund your coffers, while infrastructure improvements help you improve elements around the club, like the stadium and staff, to bring in more fans and money while developing your players more quickly and to higher levels.
On the pitch, the game uses a simple system of just a handful of attributes, rolled against each other in an adversarial manner. Want to take the ball off an opposing player? Move your player into position to make the tackle with an action, which each team takes in turns of three actions at a time, and then the game rolls a random number for each player based on their associated skill, defense vs. control in this case.The higher number wins.
This simple mechanic lays the baseline for this tabletop style approach to a game of footie, while the ability for players to develop special abilities, like a sliding tackle, a pass into space, or a rainbow past an opponent, adds the tactical depth of managing your positions to get the most out of every player.
The Cyclist: Tactics
I discovered The Cyclist: Tactics after catching Netflix’s Tour de France: Unchained and seeing what kind of cycling games were available. While I nearly bit on a more traditional management sim set in the cycling world, the twist of a tactical game caught my eye, and I’m glad it did, as this proved to be a true gem.
In The Cyclist: Tactics, you take charge of a cycling team, with your own created biker at its core, just like in traditional sim games. Rather than simply dictating game plans to the team and giving orders during it, you instead make the choice of how far to move your riders across the course of the race.
Where the game shines is in how effectively it makes you feel like truly overseeing a grand tour cycling race. Racers have to manage their stamina levels, with time in the peloton or the back of a back granting energy-saving free movement points, while specialized skills let you develop riders for the various roles required to make a successful racing team. It’s incredible how well a game of such simple mechanics replicates the real-world strategy of timing breakaways, attacking point-scoring opportunities, and managing the Peloton to put your general classification rider or sprint and climb specialists in position to cross their lines first.
Ganbare! Super Strikers
Soccer is a sport that often prides itself on being highly tactical and cerebral, so it’s likely no surprise that another entry has chosen it as its preferred sport. In Ganbare! Super Strikers things are a bit more fantasy than football, but the game still uses turn-based movement on a pitch, just with some special perks and abilities mixed in.
The game comes with a story mode to play through as you level up your team, earning new abilities and better skills until you transform your team into world beaters capable of executing your tactical commands flawlessly.
Dungeon Deathball
Adding a second fantasy game as the bookends to this list, Dungeon Deathball is another tactical sports game about a sport that doesn’t exist in the real world but carries some similarities and familiarities, still. Where this stands out from its tactical peers is in the implementation of roguelike elements to your progression.
The tactics in this game are tight and crunchy, despite the comic and over-the-top appeal of the presentation. If you want to scratch your sporting tactics itch and don’t need it to be in a sport you know or that is real at all, Dungeon Deathball is a great option.
